And now, with albeit significantly less fanfare, Apica, the load-testing and performance-monitoring solution for cloud and mobile apps, announced that it has closed a $2 million series B round. Less glamorous than rock music, but fundmental to web and mobile operating procedures, to be sure.

The round was led by Swedish venture firm Industrifonden, with participation from ALMI Invest and existing investor, KTH Chalmers Capital. The startup raised $1.3 million back in August of 2010, and has raised approximately $4.4 million to date.

Each of the participating investors are Swedish firms that are duly excited about Apica’s expansion into the U.S. market, as the startup will use the round to finish its move into its new U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto. That being said, Apica will have some competition from Silicon Valley-based SOASTA, which has raised $20.7 million for its cloud-based testing solutions, as well as from Keynote Systems, a veteran of the mobile and web apps performance monitoring space.

But, the Swedish company has had some success in Europe, already having attracted 250 customers including eBay Sweden, Thomas Cook EU, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Apica is also, according to its team, in the midst of closing a deal with Newsday and recently forged strategic partnerships with Rackspace and RightScale.

The startup also hopes that its newly unveiled product, Apica Watch, a cloud service that uses Selenium (a portable software testing framework for web apps), to enable users to easily measure and analyze web pages, including stylesheet, images, videos and third party calls, will make it appealing to businesses looking to optimize and test their cloud apps pre-deployment.

While businesses understand the importance of web and cloud performance testing, it can be difficult for small businesses to navigate through the specifics of cloud functionality, avoiding redundancy and ensuring performance scalability, and to verify that your web app is taking full advantage of the nuances of load balancing, server caching, and all that good stuff.

Apica brings the ability to load test a company’s system to mimic high traffic and system overloading from anywhere in the world, without having to run these tests in their own infrastructure. According to Apica CEO Sven Hammar, Apica’s cloud performance testing solutions have run some of the largest load tests conducted on cloud infrastructure, which the startup makes easily available to every size business and enterprise.